I’ve felt that the popular subreddits were on a decline ever since Reddit was featured in so many YouTube slop videos, but with time the effect of identity loss is becoming increasingly obvious. The crowd on there is not what it used to be. Gone is the desire for accurate information, meaningful comments, sources, and giving credit. Reddit is no longer a niche product but a mainstream one that my parents and “normie” friends know and it reflects in the lower quality content and user participation.

Unfortunately a lot of people think it’s to do with scraping as well. The amount of “defederate Threads so that they can’t scrape my data” posts I saw was about 50-50 with the sensible takes.

Yes, you will miss replies. This is the nature of federation as it is now.

How is your experience worse if you’ll never see the hashtag?

You’re right, that’s a very fair use case, and it would also boost the end-user appeal. I didn’t address it as I was fully in a user mindset.

Maybe it is overlooked, but is that unexpected when it seems to cater to such a specific niche? I’m struggling to see why I would use it. If I want to play my own music, I can just use my local setup that uses better apps and has my playlists already. If I want discovery, I can use last.fm, YouTube Music, and other venues. If I want to share music with other people, I start to see a point, but would rather direct people to use Soulseek or a different self-hosted solution that allows downloads. Speaking of, why is there no download link on the files? The website is sharing copyrighted content either way, what difference does it make whether it’s saved or streamed to my PC? At least with a download option I could see it as a Soulseek alternative.

And personally, it seems like a lot of effort to upload and reorganise my collection when I can’t trust the server and my effort to still be there a few years down the line. After all, storage costs money and who knows when the server host will get bored, run out of spare cash, or get taken down for hosting licensed music. This is before we get into the fact that even the shitty opus re-encodes I keep are over 60gb (the instance I found only supports 50). Of course you’ll tell me to host my own instance, but that is narrowing the niche once again as I would have to move my music to a server and learn how to host Funkwhale and would be opening myself up to legal problems.

Excuse my skepticism but I can only really see the use for either:

• Music collectors that want to share music with each other but for some reason don’t want to expand their library via downloading.
• Users with a tiny or non-existent library that don’t mind locking themselves into another website they don’t control and can lose their data from at any moment.

Self-hosting any wiki software solves the problems of Fandom, surely? I fail to see how federation solves any of Fandom’s issues.

It bothers me how rose-tinted this article is. It pours praise onto the fediverse while glossing over all the major problems. They also keep saying “everything is available everywhere”, which it isn’t, or “you can take your account anywhere” which isn’t a thing on most fediverse sites, and where it is it’s limited.

I dunno, it’s good to be positive, but I feel this article over-promises and fails to explain what is is trying to. If anything, it muddies some of the basics and sets people up to leave as soon as they realise the experience isn’t all that or that instances don’t work how they think.

I happily follow users that make things. Artists, video producers, what have you. I don’t want to miss any of their work. That said, not having user profiles wasn’t a big deal on Reddit, you would just create a subreddit with your username and it worked fine.

• Is there a plan to improve search and federating communities between instances? My biggest hurdle joining and using Lemmy was without a doubt the search functionality and subscribing to a community on my own instance, it was severely off-putting. Let me walk you through it: you find a community you like, say [email protected]. You paste it into the search of your instance, as instructed. It immediately tells you “No results”. If you don’t click off, sometimes it changes it’s mind within a few seconds. Sometimes it never loads. You try manually creating the URL by going to example.com/c/[email protected] but it gives you an error. If you’re lucky it works the next day, if you’re not then I don’t actually know the next step. Not to mention the lack of feedback on subscribing to communities. I have “subscribed” to communities before then realised a week later that despite appearing in my list of subs it didn’t actually work and I have to redo, the only feedback you get is “pending”. This is the #1 issue that stops me from recommending Lemmy, or at least smaller instances that haven’t federated with much yet. Is the search a priority?

• I know you’ve been asked about splitting NSFW already, but is there any chance of a specific NSFL tag or a generic spoiler/blur tag? Gore and nudity are such different topics they really don’t deserve to be under the same banner.

• Are proper inline previews something on the roadmap? What I mean is items like YouTube videos, Streamable links, and just about anything that isn’t a Lemmy image is not expandable and requires leaving the website. It’s one of my most missed features from old Reddit with RES.

I read as much of the thread as possible, so hopefully these are new questions. Hope I didn’t come across too negative here as I’ve been enjoying my time overall and I know y’all have been swamped these months and never expected this popularity.

Should block pornlemmy as well in that case.